Astronauts Nie Haisheng and Liu Boming performed a spacewalk outside the Tiangogng space station core module Tianhe on Aug. 20 2021. See the highlights here.
Credit: Space.com | footage courtesy: China Central Television | produced & edited by Steve Spaleta (http://www.twitter.com/stevespaleta)
Advancing the well-being of animals, people and the planet — aaron schacht — executive vice president, innovation, regulatory & business development, elanco.
Aaron Schacht is Executive Vice President: Innovation, Regulatory + Business Development at Elanco (https://www.elanco.com/), an American pharmaceutical company which produces medicines and vaccinations for pets and livestock, and which until 2,019 was a subsidiary of Eli Lilly and Company.
Prior to this, Mr. Schacht held a role of Global Brand Development Leader – Pain in Lilly Biomedicines. He was the global leader for product development and commercialization activities for Lilly’s novel CGRP neutralizing antibody – a new potential treatment for prevention of Migraine and Cluster Headache.
In 2,012 Mr. Schacht joined Lilly Biomedicines as Senior Advisor – Strategy & Business Development for Lilly BioMedicines. His responsibilities included oversight of Therapeutic Strategy development, R&D Portfolio Management, and Business Development for Lilly BioMedicines – Lilly’s largest business unit. Past roles included serving as Executive Director, Global External R&D, at Eli Lilly and Company, where he was responsible for implementation of strategies which aim to leverage novel approaches to external partnerships to augment Lilly’s access to pharmaceutical innovation as well as Executive Director of LRL (Lilly Research Labs) Strategy, Portfolio Management and Project Management where he was responsible for strategic planning, R&D portfolio and project management. Prior to these roles, he was Director, Innovation Center in the eLilly organization where he focused on the exploration, incubation and implementation of new business models and capabilities relevant to the strategic evolution of the pharmaceutical industry.
In 2,002 during a short leave from Lilly, Mr. Schacht was co-founder, President and CEO of Artesian Therapeutics, a Gaithersburg, MD cardiovascular drug discovery start-up.
NASA reopened the Apollo mission control center after a complete restoration.
The goal was to transform the room back to its Apollo-era configuration.
From ashtrays to coffee mugs to clothing items…
The pencil sharpener is my favorite detail.
Researchers from the National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (NICT, President: TOKUDA Hideyuki, Ph.D.), Network Research Institute, succeeded the first S, C and L-bands transmission over long-haul distances in a 4-core optical fiber with standard outer diameter (0.125 mm). The researchers, lead by Benjamin J. Puttnam, constructed a transmission system that makes full use of wavelength division multiplexing technology by combining different amplifier technologies, to achieve a transmission demonstration with date-rate of 319 terabits per second, over a distance of 3,001 km. Using a common comparison metric of optical fiber transmission the data-rate and distance produce of 957 petabits per second x km, is a world record for optical fibers with standard outer diameter.
In this demonstration, in addition to the C and L-bands, typically used for high-data-rate, long-haul transmission, we utilize the transmission bandwidth of the S-band, which has not yet been used for further than single span transmission. The combined 120nm transmission bandwidth allowed 552 wavelength-division multiplexed channels by adopting 2 kinds of doped-fiber amplifier together with distributed Raman amplification, to enable recirculating transmission of the wideband signal. The standard cladding diameter, 4-core optical fiber can be cabled with existing equipment, and it is hoped that such fibers can enable practical high data-rate transmission in the near-term, contributing to the realization of the backbone communications system, necessary for the spread of new communication services Beyond 5G.
The results of this experiment were accepted as a post-deadline paper presentation at the International Conference on Optical Fiber Communications (OFC 2021).
The universe is (nearly) 14 billion years old, astronomers confirm.
With looming discrepancies about the true age of the universe, scientists have taken a fresh look at the observable (expanding) universe and have estimated that it is 13.77 billion years old (plus or minus 40 million years).
Drone accidentally hits plane causing major damage.
I wonder if we’re going to see more of these incidents in the future.
An aircraft attempting to land at Buttonville, an airport with proximity to Toronto’s suburbs, sustained “major damage” after being hit by a York Regional Police (YRP) drone earlier this month. Strangely enough, the country’s air navigation service provider, NAV Canada, was not even informed of the police drone operation.
The pilot thought the plane must have hit a large bird and proceeded to land. There was no change in configuration or power since they were about 500 feet above ground level and landing was imminent. The report reads:
Deforestation is getting worse in the Amazon.
Between August2020and July 2,021 the rainforest lost 10.476 square kilometers – an area nearly seven times bigger than greater London and 13 times the size of New York City, according to data released by Imazon, a Brazilian research institute that has been tracking the Amazon deforestation since 2008. The figure is 57% higher than in the previous year and is the worst since 2012.
Sharp wave-ripples from the hippocampus are shown to modulate peripheral glucose homeostasis in rats, offering insights into the mechanism that links sleep disruption and blood glucose regulation in type 2 diabetes.
Program aims to provide physical systems with ability to adapt to unexpected events in real-time and effectively communicate system changes to human and AI operators.
Many complex, cyber-physical military systems are designed to last for decades but their expected functionality and capabilities will likely evolve over time, prompting a need for modifications and adaptation. High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicles (HMMWV), for example, had a design life of 15 years, but are now undergoing modernization to extend the average age of the fleet to 37+ years. At design time, these systems are built to handle a range of expected operating environments and parameters. Adapting them is currently done in an improvisational manner – often involving custom-tailored aftermarket remedies, which are not always commonly available, require a skilled technician to install, and can take months or even years to procure. Further, as they evolve and are placed outside of their original design envelop these systems can fail unexpectedly or become unintentionally dangerous.
“Today, we start with exquisitely built control systems but then someone needs to add something or make a modification – all of which results in changes to the safe operating limits,” said DARPA program manager John-Francis Mergen. “These changes are done in a way that wasn’t anticipated – or more likely couldn’t have been anticipated – by the original designers. Knowing that military systems will undoubtedly need to be altered, we need greater adaptability.”
In response, DARPA developed the Learning Introspective Control (LINC) program. The program aims to develop machine learning (ML)-based introspection technologies that enable systems to adapt their control laws as they encounter uncertainty or unexpected events. The program also seeks to develop technologies to communicate these changes to a human or AI operator while retaining operator confidence and ensuring continuity of operations.
FENCE program selects researchers to develop low-power, low-latency neuromorphic camera technologies to enable future military applications.
DARPA today announced that three teams of researchers led by Raytheon, BAE Systems, and Northrop Grumman have been selected to develop event-based infrared (IR) camera technologies under the Fast Event-based Neuromorphic Camera and Electronics (FENCE) program. Event-based – or neuromorphic – cameras are an emerging class of sensors with demonstrated advantages relative to traditional imagers. These advanced models operate asynchronously and only transmit information about pixels that have changed. This means they produce significantly less data and operate with much lower latency and power.
“Neuromorphic refers to silicon circuits that mimic brain operation; they offer sparse output, low latency, and high energy efficiency,” said Dr. Whitney Mason, the program manager leading the FENCE program. “Event-based cameras operate under these same principles when dealing with sparse scenes, but currently lack advanced ‘intelligence’ to perform more difficult perception and control tasks.”
Today’s state-of-the-art (SOTA) cameras work well with scenes that have few changes to track and the imagery is relatively simple. Take, for example, a scene of a plane moving through a clear blue sky. SOTA imagers could easily track the movement of the plane. Their capabilities fail, however, in highly cluttered and dynamic scenes, limiting their use among many military applications.
